Saturday, August 13, 2011

First Week of School

I can hardly believe we are in the fourth week of school! Since I had most of my kids last year in kindergarten, on the first day of school we jumped right back to where we left off last year. This is the time of the year when looping is awesome! :)

Even though we have been in school for almost a month, I wanted to share a few of the things I used for the first week of school. Most of the ideas came from the fabulous Fun with Firsties unit from Babbling Abby.

We started out by reading the book First Grade Jitters and reading a poem called Jitter Juice. We talked about how sometimes we feel nervous coming to school, and how to get rid of those "jitters." I had the kiddos circle all the sight words they knew and draw themselves drinking jitter juice. We then made jitter juice by using the recipe in the Fun with Firsties unit. It's basically sprite, sherbert and some lemonade powder. The kids loved it! :)

We did a lot of all about me activities. Even though I have my kids from last year, my class size went up from 16 to 18 so we had a couple new students. I did several of the activities from Deanna Jump's back to school unit.

The kids drew themselves on the first day of school, and of course, I had them draw me. :) I also included an assessment (phonics and math) in the packet to show parents at beginning of the year conferences.

My favorite activity of the week was making our paper mini-me's. Here's mine!

The kids had a blast decorating them. I left them go to town on the face and hair and BOY did they turn out adorable.

The kids also decorated an all about me book and we stapled it to their mini-me.

For reading, we dove straight into launching the Daily 5 . If you have not read the Daiy 5 or CAFE books, you should check them out! I have absolutely LOVED implementing it in my classroom. Basically, the Daily 5 fosters independence in young students during the literacy block. Each day the kids get to choose from read to self, read to someone, listen to reading, word work and work on writing as their literacy centers. During the first week of school we worked on building our stamina in read to self. We started out doing 3 minutes of reading and have worked our way up to 20 minutes. We have also started work on writing and reading to someone. Next week we will add word work and finally listen to reading.

For math we started our calendar binders and worked on an all about number packets that showed many different ways to make the numbers 1 through 10 (tallies, number sentences, time, ordinal numbers, etc.)

For writing, I had the kids write about what they did over the summer. I always model writing before I send the kids off so I wrote about my fun day at Sea World with my teacher friend Katie.

Here is a couple examples from the kids:

(First story: This summer I went to New York. In New York I went to the beach. I loved it. I had a great day. The end. Second story: I went to Sea World. I saw a killer whale. It was good and they got water on me.)

At the end of the week we worked on a my first week in first grade book from the Fun with Firsties unit. Here's a few examples from the kids:

(It was my birthday during the first week of school and the kids spoiled me rotten.)

(translations: warm and fuzzies - i have a jar I fill up with little "warm and fuzzies" when the kids do something awesome. if they fill it up, they get a prize. this girl put worms instead of warm...haha)

Hope you enjoyed our first week of school! Stay tuned for posts on our weather unit and plants unit!